Devotional 54: The Freed Will: The Regenerate Man Made Willing by Grace

The Confession Read

Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation: so as, a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 9, Section 3

Introduction

Imagine a man lying in an open grave. The sun warms his face, the breeze stirs his hair, voices drift down from above. Someone calls: Rise. Walk out. The grave has no lock, the sky is open, the path is clear. And yet he does not rise. He cannot rise. He will not rise; he is dead. The corpse has bones and sinews and flesh, all the physical components of a living man, but the principle of life is absent. Without that principle every command is a mockery and every invitation a cruelty. This is the Westminster Confession's diagnosis of you and me in our natural state. We saw Section 1's anatomy of the will as a created faculty, free from coercion and absolute necessity. We saw Section 2's portrait of the will in its original uprightness, poised in Eden with genuine power to obey and genuine liability to fall. Section 3 brings us into the darkness that the fall produced. Here is the will not as God made it but as sin has unmade it. The language is as absolute as any in the entire Confession: wholly lost, all ability, any spiritual good, altogether averse, dead in sin, not able. No loopholes. No hidden reserves of native power. No spark of spiritual life surviving the catastrophe. The will once free to choose the good is now free only to choose among evils, and the man once able to please God is now unable even to want to please Him. This is hard doctrine, and the flesh recoils from it. We want to believe that we are at least slightly alive, at least partly capable, a little bit interested in spiritual things. We want to preserve some scrap of dignity we can offer to God as our own. The Confession will not permit it, but not because the Divines were grim men who enjoyed dark pronouncements. Scripture itself will not permit it. And Scripture will not permit it because the glory of God in salvation will not permit it. If man can contribute the smallest particle to his own conversion, salvation is partly his doing and the praise partly his. But if man is dead, and dead men cannot raise themselves, then salvation is entirely of the Lord, and the praise belongs entirely to Him. The doctrine of total inability is the dark velvet upon which the diamond of sovereign grace is displayed. Remove the darkness, and the diamond loses its brilliance. Let us go where the Scripture leads, even into uncomfortable places. The Scripture leads to a clear verdict: the natural man cannot come to Christ, cannot please God, cannot understand spiritual things, and cannot even desire to do any of these things. If this sounds like a prison from which there is no escape, consider: the God who locks the door holds the key, and the key is Jesus Christ.

Scripture Foundation

The Confession draws its doctrine from the testimony of Scripture, line upon line, precept upon precept. Let us listen to four passages that together form an unbreakable chain of witness to the ruin of the will. Romans 8:7-8 — "Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God." Paul uses language that admits no softening. The mind of the flesh, the phronēma tēs sarkos, the entire orientation of the natural man's thinking and desiring and willing, is echthra, enmity — active hostility, the settled opposition of a combatant. The natural man is not a neutral observer of the things of God but a rebel whose very constitution sets itself against his Maker. Paul presses further: this mind is not subject to God's law, ouch hypotassetai, it does not submit, and oude gar dynatai, neither indeed can it be. The dynatai comes from dynamai, to have power or ability. Paul is not saying that the natural man finds submission difficult or needs assistance. He is saying the natural man lacks the capacity for submission. The will is not merely reluctant; it is incapacitated. And Paul's conclusion draws the net tight: those who are in the flesh cannot please God. The word stands like a sentinel at the gate of every human hope of self-generated righteousness. Apart from the Spirit, pleasing God is not a struggle but an impossibility. Ephesians 2:1-3 — "And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others." Paul's description of the pre-Christian state reaches its crescendo in a single Greek word: nekrous, dead. Not sick, not weakened, but dead. A sick man can cooperate with a physician; a wounded man can cry for rescue. A dead man can do none of these things. Death, in the biblical understanding, is not the cessation of existence but the absence of the principle that makes existence what it ought to be. So the natural man does not cease to be a human being with intellect, affections, and will; he ceases to function as one in relation to God. He still thinks, but his thinking is darkened. He still chooses, but his choices are governed by the lusts of the flesh. He is alive in the world but dead toward God, walking in trespasses with all the vitality of a living man but with none of the spiritual life that alone makes pleasing God possible. The corpse in the grave is not a preacher's rhetorical flourish; it is the apostle's own image for the state of every child of Adam apart from regenerating grace. What can a corpse do to prepare itself for resurrection? Nothing. The quickening must come from outside, from the same power that raised Christ from the tomb. "You hath he quickened." The dead do not assist in their own resurrection. 1 Corinthians 2:14 — "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." Here Paul introduces a term that would become central to the Reformed vocabulary of inability: psychikos anthrōpos, the natural man, the soulish man, the man whose highest operating principle is his own human soul rather than the Spirit of God. The psychikos man is not subhuman; he may be cultured, intelligent, morally upright by every human measure. He may read theology with pleasure, discourse on religion with eloquence, admire the ethics of Jesus with sincerity. But when the things of the Spirit are presented to him as realities to be received, believed, loved, and obeyed, he does not receive them and cannot know them. The verb dechetai, receives, suggests a welcoming, an embrace, a taking to oneself. The natural man does not welcome the things of the Spirit because they appear to him as mōria, foolishness. And the reason he cannot know them is not a lack of intellectual capacity but a lack of spiritual discernment. The faculty that perceives spiritual reality is not a sharper mind or a better education but the indwelling Spirit of God, and the natural man does not have the Spirit. He is like a blind man standing before a Rembrandt: the painting is objectively present, objectively beautiful, objectively valuable, but the blind man lacks the organ by which its beauty is apprehended. The fault is not in the painting; it is in the perceiver. And the perceiver cannot heal his own blindness. John 6:44 — "No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him." Here is Christ's own testimony to the inability of the natural will. After the feeding of the five thousand, the crowd follows Jesus across the lake, eager for more bread. Jesus declares Himself the bread of life. The Jews murmur. Jesus sharpens His message: no man can come to me unless the Father draws him. The verb dynatai declares inability; the verb helkysē, draws, describes the action of bringing someone against resistance — the same verb used for dragging a net full of fish to shore. The drawing is not a gentle invitation leaving the will free to accept or refuse; it is the conquering power of the Father overcoming resistance. Jesus does not say some find it difficult. He says oudeis dynatai elthein, no man can come — not because the way is blocked from without but because the will is disabled from within. The Father must act first, or none will ever come at all. Romans 5:6 — "For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." Paul's phrase asthenōn, without strength, helpless, provides the final brushstroke. It describes a patient too weak to lift a spoon to his lips, a swimmer whose arms have failed in the sea. Christ died not for the righteous but for the ungodly, not for those making progress but for those without strength. The timing of Christ's death, "in due time," was calibrated to find us at our worst. When we could do nothing, Christ did everything. The cross is not a bridge we walk halfway; it is the act of a God who comes all the way to a people who cannot take a single step toward Him. Asthenōn is the final nail in the coffin of every attempt to make the sinner a co-contributor to his salvation. We were without strength, and Christ died for us. The weakness was total; the grace was total.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines composed Section 3 with the precision of surgeons operating on a spiritual condition that the patient is constitutionally unable to diagnose. Every phrase in the section has a target, and every target is an error that threatened the gospel in the seventeenth century and threatens it still. The opening clause, "Man, by his fall into a state of sin," locates the origin precisely where Scripture does: the inability is not part of man's created constitution. God did not make man unable; man made himself unable by his own rebellion. The fall was not a stumble from which Adam could pick himself up; it was a plunge into a settled constitutional condition that affects every natural descendant of Adam. To be in Adam is to share in the state of sin into which Adam fell. The inability of the will is not a personal failing some overcome by superior effort; it is a federal condition that binds the entire race. The next phrase, "hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation," contains three absolutes: wholly, all, any. There is no partial loss of ability; the loss is total. There is no ability that remains in some hidden compartment of the will; all ability is gone. And the ability that is lost pertains to any spiritual good, even the smallest movement of the soul toward God. The Confession is not saying that fallen man cannot perform external acts of religion. A hypocrite can pray, a Pharisee can give alms, an unregenerate preacher can handle holy things with outward decorum. But none of these acts are "spiritual good accompanying salvation" because they do not proceed from a heart that loves God, do not aim at the glory of God, and do not unite the soul to Christ. They are, in Augustine's memorable phrase, splendid vices, dazzling in the sight of men but dead in the sight of God. The ability that is lost is not the ability to perform religious motions but the ability to will and to do what pleases God, to love God above all things, to trust Christ with a living faith, to repent with a genuine sorrow for sin as an offense against God rather than a threat to self. These things, and anything that leads toward them, are beyond the reach of the natural will. The phrase "a natural man" translates the Pauline psychikos anthrōpos, the man who operates according to his own soul and its resources without the indwelling Spirit. The natural man is not necessarily a brute or a villain. He may be the most cultivated man in Corinth, the most philosophically astute man in Athens, the most religiously observant man in Jerusalem. But he lacks the one thing necessary to spiritual discernment: the Spirit of God. The Confession's use of "natural" is deliberately provocative. It refuses to divide humanity into the virtuous and the vicious according to outward conduct. It divides humanity into the natural and the spiritual according to the presence or absence of the indwelling Spirit. A well-mannered pagan and a dissolute pagan are both natural men; their manners differ, but their condition does not. The Confession then describes the natural man as "altogether averse from that good." The language could hardly be stronger: not merely disinclined but averse, not slightly averse but altogether averse. The word suggests a turning away, a recoil. If God is the sun, the natural man is not a planet orbiting at a cold distance; he is a comet hurtling away into darkness with every faculty accelerating the flight. His reason constructs arguments against the truth. His affections fasten on things that compete with God. His will chooses the darkness because his deeds are evil and the light would expose them. There is no corner of his being untouched by this aversion. The totality of the aversion matches the totality of the inability: he is wholly unwilling because he is wholly unable, and he is wholly unable because he is wholly unwilling. He cannot come because he will not come, and he will not come because his will is enslaved to a nature that hates the God to whom he is summoned. The final clause declares the natural man "dead in sin," and "not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto." The Divines were aiming this at semi-Pelagianism, which granted the necessity of grace for completing conversion but claimed man could prepare himself by using his natural powers rightly. The medieval formula was facere quod in se est, do what lies within you, and God will not deny grace. The Confession sweeps it away. There is no preparation for grace that does not itself require grace. The first stirring of desire for God, the first flicker of concern for the soul — all these are the fruit of prevenient grace, not the preparation for it. The dead cannot prepare themselves to be raised. Grace does not complete what nature begins; grace begins, continues, and completes what nature could never start. The historical context of these affirmations was a battlefield on which three armies contended. On one side stood the Pelagians, ancient and modern, who denied that the fall had affected the will's capacity for spiritual good at all. For Pelagius, Adam's sin harmed Adam alone, and every human being is born with the same neutral liberty that Adam possessed. The Confession's "wholly lost all ability" is the direct negation of this claim. On the second side stood the semi-Pelagians, who admitted a wounding of the will but insisted that the will retained enough strength to turn to God if assisted by grace. The Confession's "not able, by his own strength, to convert himself" rules out this compromise. On the third side stood the Arminians, who taught that prevenient grace restores to every man the ability to choose salvation, making the decisive factor in conversion not God's sovereign election but man's free choice. The Confession's silence about any such universal restoration of ability is itself an argument: the natural man, apart from the effectual call of the Spirit, remains dead, and no common grace makes him alive enough to choose. The only grace that raises the dead is the grace that raised Christ, and it is not given to all. Robert Shaw, in his early nineteenth-century exposition, notes that the Divines restricted the loss of ability to "spiritual good accompanying salvation." The natural man retains the natural liberty defined in Section 1. He can choose what to eat, where to live, whom to marry. He can perform acts of civic virtue, cultivate the arts, advance the sciences. The Confession does not deny that unregenerate men can do things that benefit their neighbors and adorn civilization. What it denies is that any of these acts, whatever their horizontal value, have vertical value before God. They do not proceed from faith, they are not done to the glory of God, and they do not advance the soul a single inch toward salvation. The will is dead toward God, whatever life it displays toward man.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of total inability did not emerge from the study of the Westminster Divines alone. It is the common confession of the Reformed churches across the centuries, and the great doctors of the tradition have shone the light of Scripture into every corner of this dark room. Martin Luther's De Servo Arbitrio, The Bondage of the Will, written in 1525 against Erasmus, remains a thunderous treatment of human inability. Luther saw with clarity that the question of the will's bondage was the question on which the entire Reformation stood or fell. If the will is free to turn to God, grace is assistive and salvation cooperative. If the will is bound, grace is sovereign and salvation monergistic. Luther pressed Erasmus relentlessly: does the will, apart from grace, have any power to turn toward God? Erasmus equivocated. Luther would not let him. The will, Luther insisted, is like a beast standing between two riders. If God mounts, it goes where God wills. If Satan mounts, it goes where Satan wills. But it does not choose its rider. The rider chooses the beast. This image captures exactly what the Confession means: the natural man's will is active but always under a master that is not God. Until that master is overthrown by a stronger one, the will serves sin freely and cannot do otherwise. John Owen devoted his massive treatise on the Holy Spirit to regeneration, addressing the natural man's state with remarkable thoroughness. Owen insists that death in Ephesians 2 is not merely figurative but ontological. The soul's death is as real as the body's, consisting in the absence of the spiritual life that enables the faculties to operate Godward. A dead man has eyes but does not see, ears but does not hear. So the natural man has an intellect that does not perceive the beauty of God, affections that do not delight in Christ, a will that does not choose the good. The faculties are present; the life that animates them Godward is absent. No corpse ever climbed out of its grave by an act of will, and no natural man ever raised himself to spiritual life by his natural powers. Regeneration, Owen argues, is not divine persuasion that leaves the will intact to decide; it is divine creation that makes the will new. The Spirit does not merely shine light on truth; He gives eyes to see the light. He does not merely present Christ as desirable; He creates the desire. The work is not moral but creative, not assistive but resurrective. Thomas Watson, whose Body of Divinity distills the marrow of Puritan theology into aphorisms of pastoral wisdom, addresses the will's inability with a pastor's heart. Watson does not merely assert the doctrine; he presses it home. Why does the natural man not come to Christ? Not because he lacks knowledge: the gospel is proclaimed in his hearing. Not because he lacks opportunity: the door of mercy stands open. Not because he lacks capacity in the abstract: he has the same natural faculties as the believer. The reason is that his will is bent against Christ, and until the bent is reversed he will never choose what he hates. Watson uses the image of a bird that, though its cage door is open, does not fly out because it prefers the cage. The sinner is not kept from Christ by any external barrier but by the internal disposition of his own heart. He loves his cage, and he will not leave it unless a stronger love displaces the love that binds him. Watson then turns to the practical question: what use is this doctrine? It humbles the sinner by stripping him of every claim to spiritual self-sufficiency. It exalts grace by making salvation entirely the work of God. It drives the awakened sinner to prayer, for if he cannot convert himself he must cry out to the One who can. And it fills the believer with adoration, for the difference between the saint and the reprobate is not that the saint was wiser or better or more receptive but that God was pleased to make him alive. Charles Hodge provides a careful American treatment. Hodge distinguishes the faculty of the will from its moral state. The faculty itself is intact: the natural man has a will that chooses; it is not destroyed or replaced. But the moral state of the will is entirely corrupt. The will always chooses according to its prevailing disposition, and the natural man's disposition is enmity toward God. Hodge uses the analogy of a scale: the scale itself is not broken, but the weights are all on the side of sin. The will can choose, but it cannot choose against its own disposition. And the disposition, bent entirely away from God, guarantees that every choice moves further from Him. Hodge is particularly helpful on the nature of the inability: it is moral, not physical. It is the inability of a man who cannot swim because he refuses to learn — an inability residing not in his muscles but in his will. Yet it is as real as any physical inability, because the will cannot alter its own fundamental disposition. Only regeneration changes the disposition, and regeneration is a sovereign act of God.

Puritan Application

The doctrine of total inability is not a piece of speculative theology to be admired from a distance. It is a diagnosis that demands a response, and the response it demands will determine the entire shape of your religion. Let us draw out its practical force for the soul. First, let this doctrine kill your remaining self-righteousness. There is something in every fallen heart that wants to contribute to its own salvation, to bring something to the table, to negotiate with God from a position of at least partial strength. The doctrine of total inability takes that something and buries it. You cannot contribute because you have nothing to contribute. You cannot negotiate because you have no leverage. You cannot prepare yourself for grace because preparation requires life and you are dead. Let this sink in until it hurts, and then let it sink in further. The theological word is "inability," but the experiential word is "bankruptcy." You stand before God with nothing in your hands, nothing in your heart, nothing in your will that can commend you to Him. And the discovery of your bankruptcy, far from driving you to despair, is the threshold of the gospel. Jesus did not come for the righteous but for sinners, not for the healthy but for the sick, not for the living but for the dead. If you can admit, truly and without reservation, that you are dead, then you are precisely the kind of person Christ came to raise. The hardest words of the law are the necessary preamble to the sweetest words of the gospel. "Not able" is the dark room into which "able to save to the uttermost" shines as the morning sun. Second, let this doctrine drive you to prayer with a new urgency. If you cannot convert yourself, you must be converted by Another. If you cannot prepare yourself for grace, grace must find you unprepared and make you ready. If you cannot come to Christ unless the Father draws you, then your only hope is that the Father will draw you. And the Father has promised to be found by those who seek Him, even when the seeking itself is the faintest flicker of a grace-implanted desire. Do not wait until you feel worthy to pray. Do not wait until you have prepared yourself adequately. Pray as you are, with whatever broken words and half-formed longings the Spirit has stirred within you. Cry out with the father of the demon-possessed boy: "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." Cry out with the publican: "God be merciful to me, a sinner." The prayers of the helpless are the prayers God delights to answer, because they give Him all the glory. If you find within yourself even the smallest desire to be made alive, that desire is not your own contribution to the process; it is the first breath of the Spirit in your lungs. Nurture it on your knees. Third, let this doctrine teach you patience with the unconverted. It is easy to grow frustrated with those who hear the gospel repeatedly and seem unmoved. We are tempted to think that if we could only find the right argument, the right illustration, the right tone of voice, we could persuade them. But the barrier is not intellectual; it is spiritual. The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit because they appear to him as foolishness. No argument can create the faculty by which spiritual truth is discerned. This does not mean we abandon apologetics or evangelism; it means we pursue them in a spirit of dependence, knowing that our words are instruments in the hands of a sovereign Spirit and that the same Spirit who must open the heart is the One to whom we pray for that opening. When you speak to the unconverted, speak as one who was once dead and was raised by no power of your own. The humility that comes from knowing your own inability will make you gentle with those who are still in the state you once inhabited. And it will make you pray for them with the kind of prayer that does not argue with God about what they deserve but pleads with God for what He alone can give. Fourth, let this doctrine fill you with the deepest adoration for the grace that saved you. Why do you believe while your neighbor does not? Why did the gospel become beautiful to you while it remains foolishness to another? The answer is not in you. It is not that you were wiser, or humbler, or more spiritually sensitive, or more willing to listen. If you are in Christ, it is because God, who commanded light to shine out of darkness, shone in your heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The same power that spoke the universe into existence spoke life into your dead soul. The same Spirit who hovered over the formless void of creation hovered over the formless void of your heart and brought forth light and life and order. This is the mystery of sovereign grace, and it should make you sing. Your salvation is not a joint venture between you and God. It is a new creation, and in the new creation, as in the old, God alone is the Creator. Let this truth humble you and exalt you at the same time: humble you because you brought nothing, exalt you because you have been given everything. Fifth, let this doctrine frame your understanding of the Christian life from start to finish. The same inability that characterized your unregenerate state, though broken by regeneration, is not yet fully removed. The believer still finds within himself a principle of resistance to spiritual good. Paul's cry in Romans 7, "the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do," is the cry of a regenerate man who discovers that his will, though made alive toward God, is still impeded by indwelling sin. The Christian life is not a graduation from dependence to independence. It is a deepening dependence on the same grace that first made you alive. You began in helplessness, and you continue in helplessness, and you will finish in helplessness, leaning on the arm of the Beloved all the way. The bread you begged for at conversion is the bread you beg for at every stage of sanctification. You cannot mortify a single sin by your own strength. You cannot produce a single act of genuine love by your own power. You cannot persevere a single day apart from the keeping grace of God. But this is not a cause for despair; it is a cause for relief. The pressure is off. You do not need to be strong enough, because Christ is strong for you. You do not need to manufacture spiritual life, because the Spirit is the fountain of that life within you. Your part is to abide in the Vine, to draw from the root, to depend on the hand that holds you. And the hand that holds you is the hand that was pierced for you, and it will never let you go.

Prayer

O most holy and sovereign Lord God, who dwellest in light unapproachable and yet stoopest to raise the dead, we confess before Thee with shame and sorrow that the diagnosis of Thy Word is true of us: we are, by nature, dead in trespasses and sins, altogether averse from the good, wholly unable to will or to do what pleases Thee. We brought nothing to our salvation but the guilt that made it necessary and the bondage that made it impossible apart from Thee. If Thou hadst left us to ourselves, we would have fled from Thee forever, loving our chains and calling our darkness light. The fault is ours, the ruin is ours, and the judgment that we deserved was just. And yet, O God, we bless Thee that Thou didst not leave us in the grave we had chosen. When we were without strength, Christ died for the ungodly. When we were dead, Thou didst speak the word of life, and our hearts that could not beat for Thee began to beat. When we could not come, Thou didst draw us with cords of love that were stronger than our rebellion. When we could not see, Thou didst open our eyes to behold the King in His beauty. All that we are in Christ we owe to Thee, and all the praise belongs to Thee alone. Let no pride remain in us that would claim a share in what Thou alone hast done. Grant us, we beseech Thee, to live every day in the light of this truth. When we are tempted to trust in our own strength, remind us that we are no stronger than Adam in paradise, and that only the hand that holds us keeps us from falling. When we are tempted to despair over our remaining sin, remind us that the same power that raised us from spiritual death will bring us all the way to glory. When we speak to those who are yet dead in sin, fill us with the patience that knows the barrier is not intellectual but spiritual, and with the faith that pleads with Thee for what only Thou canst give. When we pray, let us pray as those who have nothing and need everything, confident that Thou art more ready to give than we are to ask. And bring us at last, O Lord, to that blessed state where inability is no more, where the will that now limps toward Thee shall run and not be weary, where the heart that now loves Thee imperfectly shall love Thee perfectly, and where we shall see Thy face and be satisfied with Thy likeness. Hasten that day, for the sake of Jesus Christ, our risen and reigning Lord, in whose name we pray. Amen.